Stardew Valley is a magical gaming experience. The indie RPG and farming simulator puts you in control of a rundown farm inherited from your grandfather in the small village of Pelican Town where you’re free to mingle with neighbors, explore monster-filled mines, or build a goat cheese empire.
There are plenty of ways to approach the game, but players can be left wanting a new experience after a few playthroughs. If you’re looking to freshen up your Stardew Valley experience, you should consider modding your game. Community-made mods can fix tricky mechanics, add new characters and even entirely new towns.
Expansion mods
If you’ve played through Stardew Valley once, returning can be a bit of a letdown. You know everything there is to know about the villagers, have a farm plan already in place, and know the most profitable crops. Expansion mods add brand-new stories and characters to the world, giving you a fresh look at life in Pelican Town and beyond.
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Stardew Valley Expanded
If you’re looking to try a single mod to refine your Stardew Valley experience and breathe new life into the game, Stardew Valley Expanded is the first place you should look. This massive expansion by FlashShifter adds an overwhelming amount of new content that blends seamlessly with the base game we all love.
The mod adds 28 original, full-fledged NPCs, new farm layout options, 58 new locations that are introduced naturally through quest progression, hundreds of new character events and dialogue options, and so much more. Originally launched in 2019, this mod has received constant support and regular updates over the years to keep it fresh and compatible with base game updates.
If you look into other popular mods over on Nexus Mods, you’ll find that almost every top modder wants their work to be compatible with Stardew Valley Expanded. It’s the gold standard for a well-maintained mod and is widely considered to be a must-play expansion.
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Ridgeside Village
Ridgeside Village is another massive game expansion mod, but it intrudes less on the vanilla experience. Instead of blending in new locations and characters to the base game, this mod adds an entirely new and independent town to the game that’s accessible via a cable car near the bus stop.
Climb the mountain and discover a brand new adventure outside the valley with 50 new NPCs (including 22 single villagers), brand new regional festivals, and a slew of new farms and shops to explore. While the villagers of Pelican Town are always out and about, Ridgeside Village feels lived in — there’s a restaurant, a pastry shop, multiple outdoor supply stores, and even a clothing store where you can buy new outfits instead of throwing together pieces you collect in the mines.
Because you’re exploring a different region, you’ll run into forageable fruits, fish, crops, and monsters that are completely different from the base game.If you need an escape from Pelican Town, this is the mod to check out.
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East Scarp
East Scarp introduces a brand new seaside neighborhood to the east of Pelican Town. The village is home to some very unique NPCs including a new doctor, a lighthouse keeper, a slime breeder, and a children’s book author, all of which have their own complex storylines if you get to know them. The base mod is a delightful addition to the base Stardew Valley experience and is worth exploring, but the real interesting bits are added with a long list of additional NPCs that you can choose to add into the mix if you desire.
The base mod has a core development team, but the community has grown over the years and has created a collection of new mods as add-ons that you can pick and choose from. Add-ons include a high fantasy-themed expansion, a cryptozoologist NPC, a shadow guy NPC who is friends with Krobus, and a family member of Pelican Town’s hat-selling mouse. The entire mod pool for East Scarp is a true labor of love.
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Adventurer’s Guild Expanded
The Adventurer’s Guild is an exciting faction for Stardew Valley players looking to get their hands dirty with monster blood instead of soil back at the farm. Unfortunately, there isn’t much depth to the guild in the base game. There’s a bounty list of monsters to hunt down and a few cool weapons to purchase, but you can’t interact much with guild members Marlon and Gil, there’s not a lot of good lore about the creatures lurking in the mine, and there isn’t substantial late-game content to explore on the adventure-front.
Adventurer’s Guild Expanded gives players a, well, real adventure. The mod adds a new questline exploring the history of monsters in the mine, Marlon’s extended family that includes two romanceable characters, brand new monster-infested locations, and a slime companion that you can invite to live on your farm.
Quality-of-Life Mods
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Despite regular updates, there are still plenty of mechanical hiccups in Stardew Valley that can be annoying, even if you’re prepared for them. These quality-of-life mods fix the little problems that can get in the way of running your farm.
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Tractor Mod
With the start of every season, your farm will be plagued with weeds, logs, and stones that you need to remove before planting your seeds. And even with the top tools in the game, planting seeds on a massive farm can take an enormous amount of energy and time.
Tractor Mod brings Pelican Town into the modern age, allowing you to plow your fields and plant your crops using a tractor instead of by hand. This mod drastically reduces the time it takes to get your farm set up and organized each season.
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Automatic Gates
If you invest in livestock on your farm, it can get out of hand quickly. Those wandering cows, chickens, and dinosaurs are cute until they get in the way of farming or get lost when you’re trying to pet them all. Fencing your animals in keeps them safe and sound in a set location for easy access. But who among us hasn’t forgotten to close a gate that we walked through, letting an entire barn roam free on the farm? Despite its simple design, it can be a pain to close gates when there is a swarm of animals nearby.
With Automatic Gates, you’ll never need to double-check your gates again.
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Convenient Inventory
Chest management is one of the most important pieces of running a successful farm. You don’t want your seed stores getting mixed up with your forageable items. And you definitely don’t want to lose track of your valuable crops by accidentally depositing them in your fish box.
Even the most organized farmers run into issues organizing, though, and good organization takes time that you might not have on your hands. After a long run to the Skull Cavern, who has time to put away all their treasures in the correct spot before you pass out in front of your home?
With the Convenient Inventory mod, storage management becomes so much easier and more efficient. Instead of opening up chests one at a time, you can add items from your inventory to existing stacks in multiple chests at the same time. Have a mix of ore, fish, food and gifts in your inventory? Just hit one button in your inventory and everything will be safely tucked away in the appropriate chest. Of course, if there’s something on your person that you don’t have a stack of stored, you’ll have to deposit that manually.
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Better Ranching
If you’ve ever unknowingly neglected a specific duck on your farm or tried to milk a goat that wasn’t ready, the Better Ranching mod is for you. This straightforward mod adds a new indicator above animals that are ready to be petted, milked, or sheared—saving you from running around finding out which animals need love or having to sit through a failed milking animation.
The creators of this mod also have another project focused on relationships with villagers, adding a similar indicator on NPCs to remind you to talk to them or give them gifts.
Cosmetic Mods
Stardew Valley certainly has a unique art style, but it isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. If you want to change up the game’s look or want more customization options for your character, there are plenty of mods focused entirely on aesthetics.
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DaisyNiko’s Earthy Recolour
Stardew Valley has a lot of bright colors that are fun until you’re hours into a marathon farming session and your eyes start to hurt. DaisyNiko’s Earthy Recolour gives the entire game a fresh coast of paint, creating a more natural world that’s a little easier on the eyes. This mod also adjusts the colors of easy-to-miss objects in the game, like berry bushes, the worms wriggling over dig spots, and different types of trees.
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Fashion Sense
You’ll run into plenty of fun outfits in Pelican Town, but there’s easy way to swap between outfits or create complete sets without spending hours hunting down items and praying for good RNG.
Fashion Sense is a framework mod that allows for easier appearance customization across the board: swapping new accessories, saving entire outfits, and even adding on-the-fly hairstyle changes. Just purchase the new Hand Mirror item from Pierre’s shop and you’ll have a brand-new world of fashion at your fingertips.
This base mod builds on the framework for advanced customization and is required for a long list of other available appearance mods. If you check out this mod on Nexus Mods and review the “Requirements” tab, you’ll find a massive list of cosmetic mods that require Fashion Sense to operate. We recommend checking out Rural Outfitters, Seasonal Hats, and SH’s More Accessories and Stuff Pack to update your look.
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Furniture Adjustment
Decorating your home as you acquire new furniture and expand your living quarters is a great way to spend downtime in Stardew Valley, but the default furniture placement grid can be frustrating when trying to put together a clean design for your space. You’ll buy a painting that can’t be perfectly centered over your dining room table, a rug would look a little better just a foot to the left, or certain items aren’t able to stack when you’d totally make it work in real life.
Furniture Adjustment allows you to move your items around your home pixel by pixel, breaking free from limitations and allowing you to place everything exactly how you’d like it.
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Relationship Mods
Stardew Valley is just as much about becoming an important member of the community as it is about farming. There are plenty of mods that change how you make friends and build relationships in the game for a more social experience.
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Free Love
You can certainly play the field with all of Pelican Town’s eligible single villagers, but they won’t be so happy if they find you’re dating around. Choosing someone to get married to and invite to live on your farm can be one of the most difficult decisions in a playthrough and not one to be taken lightly. Sure, you can get divorced or start a new playthrough to pursue a new partner, but it’d be a lot easier if there weren’t so many societal expectations surrounding marriage.
With the Free Love mod, all rules are off the table. You can date whoever you’d like without repercussions, marry multiple partners, and even have multiple NPCs live with you. Just try to stay on everyone’s good side and remember to give them a gift on their birthday.
Stardew Valley is a fantastic game on its own and is hands down one of the best cozy games (or Neighborvanias) of all-time. We definitely recommend playing the game in its entirety in a vanilla run before experimenting with mods. Once you’ve experienced al the base Valley has to offer, jump into the world of community modding with open arms.
